TSM Botting

Hey guys, been using TSM for quite a while and love the addon. Just wanted to share some information about the botting community's use of TSM. Botting has been around forever but the latest form of sophisticated botting is actually using TSM to exponentially multiply their profits. I have one guy on my server that I'm 100% sure is using TSM to bot-post/cancel his glyphs.

Here's the current HonorBuddy thread about using TSM for botting:

The author is actually blatantly mentioning the "anti-bot" features in TSM and implementing counter-measures. So this is a serious problem. I know there's not much that can be done about it, but I figured it might be helpful to actually see the discussion going on and to have first-hand knowledge of what the botters are doing and how they're thinking about TSM. It might help future development.

Last edited by Kathroman; April 26th, 2012 at 12:27 PM.
Reason: Link Removed

If they continue with using a script to make the modifications (instead of redistributing a pre-modified version), I would, upon every build:

1) break each file up into multiple parts (like individual functions where order doesn't matter)
2) shuffle the parts
3) insert multi-line comments of varying length between those parts
4) recombine those parts into a file for distribution
5) include the code as comments between other functional parts of code (so simple greps will return multiple instances)

But @David is right, ultimately they have all the source code, and will do what they want with it.

I closely monitor and often improve the effectiveness of the anti-bot code in TSM. It really is a cat and mouse game. I put a lot of anti-bot stuff into the base structure of the release version expecting them to try to attack it from a specific angle, and they went a completely different way

Just because it's possible to get around them, I don't at all think it removes the benefit from perusing anti-bot code in TSM (not that anybody has said this in this thread specifically).

I am happy to entertain a discussion about this topic, but any links to bot-ing forums or encouragement of bot-ing practices will be dealt with per the general Consortium policy (ie removed). Discussion about specific TSM anti-bot code is something I'd recommend staying away from. General thoughts like Erorus' post above are certainly welcome.